[Hebrew Barrister]

The story goes that Japanese suffered from a linguistic bottleneck - that is, the founding group of people from whence Japanese originally arose was small and hence the "authentic Japanese" vocabulary is itself small. Consequently importing words from foreign languages is both necessary and unremarkable.

The results nonetheless amuse - e.g., "sarariman" = "salaryman" or white-collar worker; "esukareta" = "escalator", etc. There was a London Japanese newssheet called the "London Dayori" - "dayori" being the transliteration into English of the transliteration into Japanese of the word "diary". When I worked in Tokyo for a couple of months in 1987, my regular order at the local coffee shop was "espressu larju tekato" with a shot of "miruku". And years later, I heard a women at the next table asking the waiter for an "apuru jusu".

Finally, "karaoke" has two phonemes, "kara-" meaning "empty" as in "karate" - "empty hand", and "-oke" from...orchestra.

Please tell me this post is true, so I can fall over in laughter. Sarariman? I'm going to hell for my amusement at that one.

 

[Hebrew Barrister]

As a member of this community who has perhaps been admonished more than most (amongst those still permitted to contribute, at least!) I would note that the moderation of a disparate, oft opinionated, culturally heterogeneous, and occasionally rowdy, bunch such as we enjoy the company of here on AAAC is not always such a straightforward task.

You have the unique skill of making insensitive statements in a humorous fashion, leading to most of us most likely just being amuaed at your shenanigans.